Mobile Search Optimization

In a world, where internet marketing is making rapid strides, taking a big percentage of the customer share in most company, search engine optimization is not a concept that can be ignored at one’s own risk. Developing a website for a product has now become synonymous with search engine optimization or designing the website and adjusting the content, the code, and the audio and video files in a way as to be search engine friendly. Even as this is gaining importance, mobile search optimization is bringing more focus to the whole business of creating search friendly sites that can be found easily.

It is not difficult to answer why mobile search optimization is becoming important. With more and more people using touch screen phones, hand held devices and smart phones in general to browse the internet and find readily available information, sites should be mobile search friendly. Given the scenarios, where people on the road are trying to find the best stores for a particular product in an area, the best hotels, restaurants or any other services, mobile search optimization is indeed very important.

To start with, sites still need to be good on the basics like usage of cleverly devised keywords, light weight design, proper HTML code etc. Then there are some extras that are really important. For example, sites need to consider two different varieties of style sheets to render pages on the handheld devices or on screens. Appropriate combinations of elements should be used to show certain things on a handheld or on a screen and then hide the same in the other case. Some sites use symbols to save space for smart phones and hide the same for the screen. Other sites use jump links which is used instead of the main navigator present at the top of the page.

G, AOL, Technorati etc. are some of the search engines for mobile phones. Yahoo has a mobile submit while G has a sitemap system using Webmaster tools area. Indexing in the search engines is important and the first step even before one starts optimizing the page for search engine. The coding standards which are generally defined by W3C are important too. Mobile search optimization can be enhanced by using XHTML, the simple reason being the strict adherence to standards in XHTML. This is needed as mobiles are not forgiving and the results might not be rendered the way one wants too if non W3C compliant coding practices are present on a site.